This past weekend, Nashville Interactive launched SpenshaOnline.com; the online home of inspirational musical artist Spensha Baker. The website design and development was handled completely by Nashville Interactive. I've said it before: creating an artist website design is always a fun project to work on. The creative freedom and ability to work with less "traditional" layouts allows the opportunity to stretch the creative muscles a bit.
The site was built using an Open-Source Content Management System so that the client has full control over their own online presence. Using open source software also means that there are no monthly licensing fees of any kind which often come along with bulkier proprietary systems.
The Nashville Interactive designed and developed scripture-lullabies.com has officially launched! This was a great project to work on. The site design is one that definitely made the web design portfolio and the development portion of the project is a perfect example of how open-source software allows for all the power and flexibility of a proprietary CMS. The site has an e-commerce aspect that allows the client to sell and manage their products directly from the site. The project also included a promotional marketing video created in After Effects. The video and the site have already become some of my favorite work of late but there's much more website and graphic design work on the horizon so stay tuned!
(oh yeah, and if you have kids, this CD is a great one to play at bedtime so check it out.)
Nashville Interactive recently designed, built and launched alwayssisterforeverbrothers.com. This website for the 2010 Always Sisters Forever Brothers Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, proved to be a great project to work on. The site design awarded Nashville Interactive the opportunity to use some pretty cool javaScript and front-end development techniques. The website features a scrolling "homepage" that creates a nice, cohesive experience for viewing the top-level content. Much care was taken to ensure that the browser back and forward buttons would work with this design and more importantly that deep linking to all the top level content within the scrollable sections would work across all the major web browsers.
The site utilizes WordPress as a content management system which allows the client to take full control of their website and in-turn the message they want to put in front of their audience. Empowering clients to control their website's content is good website design, and this sort of self sustainability is part of Nashville Interactive's primary mission.
Nashville Interactive recently completed a custom Flash design project for the world-renown Gaylord Entertainment. The client wanted a Flash-based landing page that was tied in with email marketing campaigns. The end product was a completely customizable experience that included a photo slideshow with accompanying text for each image. The all-Flash landing pages are easily "re-skinned" with xml and image replacement making them extremely flexible and quickly edited. While I've become an advocate of more "traditional" methods for web development, I always enjoy diving into some custom Flash Design.
Nashville Interactive is proud to announce that we've developed and re-launched richardmarx.com. If you aren't familiar with Richard Marx's music (you probably are even if you don't know it), He's a Grammy Award-winning, #1 song-writing (13 of them), multi-platinum album selling artist.
The Richard Marx camp was in need of a new provider for website design and development services and Nashville Interactive is flattered to be able to help out. Richard's website was less than one year old when the need arose to redevelop the established website design on a new platform. Nashville Interactive was called in to rebuild the site. In order to avoid the all-to-common scenario of being locked in to a proprietary system, open-source content management technologies were implemented. Don't get me wrong, proprietary systems have their place but open-source is the preferred solution is this type of situation. The site is controlled and owned by the client and they can do with it whatever they wish. This is just one of the advantages of using open-source content management systems to develop websites.
Designing websites for musicians and bands is always a fun project for me. Seeing the response and interaction on artist and band websites puts a lot of things into perspective because the target audience is so engaged with the artist. I'm happy to provide the tools for the interaction and see my work bringing fans and artists closer.
Open Office is a great FREE alternative to Microsoft Office for those of us on a budget. OpenOffice.org has been around for a while now but I'm just coming back to their solution and I've found that they've created (possibly long ago?) a much more user friendly Mac version. Being entrenched in website design, I've become a huge fan of open source software solutions. There's almost always a decent if not great solution to commercial software. Now I don't hate Microsoft or capitalism but if there's a good open source alternative I'll opt for that every time.
Open Office provides alternatives for a good bit of the stuff that Microsoft Office can offer. There's all the usual suspects: Text Documents (Word), Presentations (Powerpoint), Spreadsheets (excel), Databases, Drawing, Formula etcetera. Unfortuately there's not an email solution bundled in with Open Office. However, There's a lot of great open source email clients out there, like Thunderbird (which goes great with FireFox for a web browser)
Remember the good old days of x-acto knives, marker comps and rubylith paper? I don't. These ancient design techniques are something that I only had to experience while I was in college. They went along well with the professor's general "when I was your age" spiel. None the less I feel I'm a better designer for having experience at least some of what my kind had to do on a daily basis back in the day.
I was recently working on a logo design and kept finding myself right back behind the computer without having done my prefered dozens of thumbnails with pencil and paper. I have a tendancy sometimes to gravitate back to my digital safety blanket before working through ideas on paper. But, generally, I find the best technique for myself to be:
1. brainstorming words and simple ideas
2. 30-50 quick thumbnails on paper
3. working out a few roughs of the better thumbnail concepts on paper
4. researching visual treatments for those concepts
5. putting pixel to canvas on the computer via Photoshop and Illustrator
6. presenting comps to the client.
Most of the time if I follow the tried and true methods that have worked for years, I get much better results and everyone is happier in the end. While I'm not using x-actos and rubylith paper, starting designs on paper is definitely the way to go with both graphic design and website design.
